23 things to settle before Black Friday

Decide what you can afford to give away before a single ad goes up. Everything downstream depends on these numbers existing in writing.

• Write the discount floorThe deepest discount that still covers product cost, shipping, payment fees, packaging and expected returns.
• Write the paid-new acquisition-cost kill-lineThe highest cost per new customer you will keep buying at, and who stops spend when it is crossed.
• Work out contribution per order, not just ROASA strong ROAS can still sit on an order that loses money once fees and returns are counted.
• Separate blended economics from paid-new economicsNew customers cost more than returning ones. One blended number averages that difference away.
• Name who can approve a below-floor exceptionExceptions get requested at 11pm on Saturday, not in a Monday meeting.
• Set a revenue target you can reconcile against ordersPlatform-reported revenue and store revenue drift apart. Pick the number you will actually be judged on.

The systems that decide how your budgets get spent read these signals. Fix them while you still have time to notice a break.

• Deduplicate browser and server purchase eventsEach order should count once across pixel and server-side events, not twice.
• Set one primary purchase conversion actionTwo primary actions split the bidding signal and inflate what the platform reports back.
• Check analytics records unique transaction IDs and discounted pricesMissing IDs and full-price values break any reconciliation against real orders.
• Confirm campaign tags survive redirectsShortened links and redirect chains strip the tags you need to read results afterwards.
• Test email and SMS flows with real profilesLogged-out, international and new-customer profiles often miss the flows you plan to send.
• Fix a like-for-like baseline against last yearComparing this year to last only works if sessions and conversions are defined the same way.

Written rules are what let a team move fast without an argument. Agree them while there is still time to disagree properly.

• Name one owner of the weekend budget decisionSomeone has to be able to move spend without waiting for a meeting.
• Write the reallocation ruleTrigger, threshold, destination and owner, decided before the traffic arrives.
• Set up the decision logWhen, the move, the deciding number, the expected result, the actual result.
• Agree one decision metric reconciled against ordersTwo numbers means two arguments every time someone needs to act.
• Define the baseline on the retail calendarLast year's Black Friday date, not a week-shifted comparison that flatters you.
• Freeze theme, checkout and tracking changes seven days outLate changes break the same signals you will be reading over the weekend.
• Keep Black Friday customers a separate cohort through JanuaryBlending them in early resets lifetime-value models and Q1 targets on promotional buyers.

The weekend itself is short. These are the checks that make the difference between reacting and guessing.

• Run test purchases on iOS across your platform mixiOS is where browser events are most likely to be lost, and it is where most of your traffic sits.
• Start the Friday-to-Monday-morning reviewMost of the weekend's decisions get made before anyone reads a dashboard on Monday.
• Write the postmortem against actual ordersCompare each logged decision's expected result to what the orders actually say.
• Review the December cohort before resetting targetsPromotional customers behave differently. Check that before you re-plan Q1.